[MonoDevelop] Upgrade to .Net 4.0?

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:45 AM, IBBoard <ibboard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/11 15:42, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>>> I'll obviously only be doing this as a temporary local thing, but I just
>>> wondered if there was a reason for the move. I've not found anything
>>> that needs .Net 4 yet, but it means that Mono 2.6 can't build it. I've
>>> tried updating to Mono 2.8 from the openSUSE OBS, but there isn't a
>>> version of mono-jscript and other packages, so I lose various Mono apps.
>>
>> Are you actively using mono-jscript?   Because that code was never
>> completed, and has not been maintained for some 4-5 years.
>>
>> I strongly suggest that if you want to use Javascript, you use one of
>> the alternatives built on top of the DLR.   One is built with F#, the
>> other one with remObject's pascal
>>
>> Miguel
>
> I'm not myself, but F-Spot and Gnome-Do plugins from openSUSE were, so
> the upgrade uninstalled them. I've poked a bit more and found newer
> builds (which means more repos) that don't rely on mono-jscript, so I've
> upgraded to 2.8 and not lost anything important now.
>
> The general thought/concern is still there, though: Is .Net 4/Mono 2.8
> really needed for MD, or is it premature? I'd have thought that wider
> compatibility would be good, so unnecessarily preventing a big chunk of
> developers having access to MD 2.6 just because they have a slightly
> out-dated Mono from their distro wouldn't seem good.

MonoDevelop is a developer tool, so I think it's reasonable to assume
that people updating MonoDevelop should also be able to update Mono.
It's even possible we might require Mono 2.10 since it's a big
improvement over 2.8.

There are a few reasons for making the upgrade ahead of MD 2.6:
* It will make it easier to backport fixes from MD master to MD 2.6
* MonoDevelop on Mac uses MonoMac, so MD was blocking MonoMac from moving to 4.0

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com